Gamification, Part One

Discussions about education these days often reference something called “gamification”: the use of games or game-like structures to enhance learning.

On the one hand, I see the appeal: rather than fight the forces affecting students’ behavior outside the classroom, harness them and integrate them into the learning process. “Badges” will replace “grades,” and “competence-based learning” will replace degrees, etc. Now earlier iterations of online learning may well fall prey to the diploma mill problem (a piece of paper saying you can now do what you could already do), but it sounds as though the next generation of online learning tools will be more sophisticated: they will be able to empirically demonstrate that student x has learned skill y to do job z. And they achieve that result through an engaging learning process that motivates them through gamified learning modules (like a video game) that take less time (more efficient) than the traditional course/degree model.

But what unsettles me about this, from something like a sociological perspective, is that it turns everything into a “game”–the game of professional advancement and money-making that people will be playing for most of their lives, of competing and achieving and winning, will become seamless with the educational sphere. It feeds into the hyper-competitive culture we are becoming more and more each year.

Moreover, the shift from text to image based learning seems to be a kind of surrender to our culture, which has been image-based for a long time. In my view one of the chief functions is to give students the tools to RESIST and challenge and criticize the present culture–to give them a chance to be an individual. And so gamification seems like another stage in the subsumption of education by corporate values: “fun” on the outside (infotainment), soul-eroding on the inside. All to equip students with 21st century skills so that we can “beat China”, or whatever.

But to challenge THAT–video games aren’t what they used to be. Many involve sophisticated cognitive tasks. So part of the gamification craze is a challenge to the highbrow, elitist prejudice that only book smarts and book learning are real smarts and real learning. There is a parallel here to the time-lag in critiques of capitalism. I wonder whether Marxist, or Marxish, intellectuals are ragging on a form of capitalism that was, well, creatively destroyed, ages ago, and not that capitalism is perfect, but 21st century capitalism is an importantly different animal. They might retort that it is still the same SPECIES–inherently, structurally unjust and exploitative and dehumanzing, and so on…which is an essential debate to have.